Inbound marketing relies on a steady stream of content -especially blogs- that your visitors find engaging, so that
you can keep standing out online and bringing in new leads. Your blogs are the heart of your online marketing effort, because it's how people find you and it's also how Google finds you.
In fact, according to a recent Hubspot study, 92% of companies who blog multiple times a day have acquired at least one customer through their blog. The number of blog-readers is also growing, with people reading an average of 5-10 blogs a day. People use blogs to research virtually every topic on Earth, which is why it's so important to keep the content flowing steadily.
Generally speaking, the more often you update your content, the more it pays off in leads and sales. So, let's look into the relationship between content and inbound marketing success.
Frequent Content, Focused On The Customer, Brings Inbound Marketing Results
The essence of content marketing is that you're using free content on your site, like your blogs, as advertisement. With thousands of websites in any given market, great content is how you stand out from the pack. Your blogs convince people to do business with you.
Therefore, your content should always be customer-focused, answering questions that customers typically would have, or else offering solutions to problems they're researching online. As long as your potential customers have questions they're researching online, you have material for your blogs.
Plus, constant blog updates ensure Google's search spiders continue to index your site frequently. They're programmed to prefer websites with a history of frequent updates, so adding more blogs and other content also attracts more frequent indexing.
How Many Blogs? And How Often?
When you're just starting out your blog, consistency and quality is more important than sheer numbers. Don't over-extend yourself at first. When first creating and establishing a blog, it's better to only have 2-3 good blogs per week than to quickly pump out material of poor quality.
However, look to ramp up your operations over time. As we mentioned above, the optimal number of blogs is at least one per business day, so you should be looking at 5+ a week as your overall goal. Keep this in mind as you hire content writers and develop new ideas for blogs. Once a few months have gone by, you'll want to have plenty of new blogs in the pipeline so you can keep up the pace.
So, you want to be constantly pumping out new material, which drives more traffic your way. Basically, there's really no such thing as too much content as long as it remains engaging and relevant.
Be Committed For The Long-Term
One thing we like to stress about inbound marketing is that it is not a quick-fix solution. Inbound campaigns are slower to show results, especially as compared to traditional outbound marketing campaigns.
In most cases, it's going to be a minimum of four months to see a payoff on inbound strategies, but more effort translates directly to a better payoff and higher ROIs down the line. According to Hubspot's most recent State Of Inbound Marketing Report, only 9% of companies surveyed reported losing money on content marketing. It's a strategy that's very likely to pay off, given enough time to work.
Blogging both frequently and constantly will pay off more quickly than more laid-back schedules. Creating extra content campaigns, like email newsletters or podcasts, will further spread word. Social media is also great for spreading word about your new blogs and other projects.
However you go about promoting yourself online, just remember that inbound should be treated as a mid-to-long term project. The keys to successful content marketing are both consistency and quality over time.
So, how do you decide what blogs to write? Do you do any customer research, or just write about topics as they come to mind?
